Diskless workstation and some minor issues

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 08:14:03AM -0600, Ian Lepore wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-04-19 at 15:58 +0200, BERTRAND Jo?l wrote:
> > 	Second trouble. /var/log/message contains a lot of :
> > Apr  9 10:50:00 pythagore atrun[862]: cannot lock /var/at/jobs/: 
> > Permission denied
> > 
> > 	> Of course, lockd and statd are running on nfs server. Permission on 
> > /var/at are :
> > 
> > root at pythagore:/var/at # ls -al
> > total 8
> > drwxr-xr-x   4 root    wheel  512 Aug 12  2015 .
> > drwxr-xr-x  28 root    wheel  512 Apr 15 09:14 ..
> > drwxr-xr-x   2 daemon  wheel  512 Aug 12  2015 jobs
> > drwxr-xr-x   2 daemon  wheel  512 Aug 12  2015 spool
> > root at pythagore:/var/at #
> > 
> > 	> I don't understand where is the mistake.
> > 
> 
> This is a more serious problem.  I have found it to be impossible to
> run a diskless workstation with a persistant /var mounted via NFS
> (either by itself or as a directory within the nfs rootfs).  It's been
> this way for several years.  You can add varmfs=yes to your rc.conf to
> get a working system, but then you have a non-persistant /var which
> really isn't very useful.
> 
> Hmm, but the problems I usually have are with /var/run and pidfiles. 
>  I've never noticed this /var/at problem (maybe just because I gave up
> trying to run with an nfs-mounted /var before I noticed them).

I successfully run with nfs-mounted /var (actually, part of the nfs-mounted
root) on my test machines, with the following boot setting:
boot.nfsroot.options="nolockd"

What you need is the working advisory locks, but since /var is by its
structure, private, there is no need to share locking with the server
or other clients. nolockd makes the client kernel to handle adv locks
autonomously, without lockd/statd protocol.